Maurice Nicoll

Henry Maurice Dunlop Nicoll (19 July 1884 – 30 August 1953) was a Scottish neurologist, psychiatrist, author and noted Fourth Way esoteric teacher. He is best known for his Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, a five-volume collection of more than 500 talks given and distributed to his study groups in and around London from March 1941 to August 1953.

Life and work

Nicoll was born at the manse in Kelso, Scotland, the son of William Robertson Nicoll, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland and renowned man of letters. From 1903 to 1906 Nicoll studied science at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, earning First Class Honours in the Natural Science Tripos. From 1906 to 1910 he attended St Bartholomew's Hospital qualifying in medicine as a surgeon and neurologist. He served as ship's-surgeon for a brief stint to and from Buenos Aires before proceeding to tour the European hotbeds of the New Psychology, Vienna, Berlin, and finally, Zürich, where he met and became a close friend and colleague of C.G. Jung in 1912.

Jung legitimised Nicoll's belief in the mind-body dynamic by curing him of a stammer. Nicoll spent the next decade with his father-figure even making Jung godfather of his only child, Jane, in 1921.

In 1917 Nicoll published his first non-fiction monograph, Dream Psychology, the "First didactic presentation of Jung's psychology," according to the Jungian scholar Sonu Shamdasani.

In addition to his personal friendship with Jung, from 1912 through 1921 Nicoll published a number of articles on Jung's theories in professional journals, so it would not have been out of character for Nicoll to have served as a Jungian proxy at his Harley Street, London, medical practice. Following his service as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War, where he first treated the wounded at the Gallipoli, Suvla Bay offensive, and after recovering from dysentery, he arrived with the 32nd Field Hospital of the 10th Irish division and did the same at the Siege of Kut, in Mesopotamia.